Responding to Nature: Thomas Radzienda

The best way to characterize my life is a loving response to nature. I have been developing our fruit orchard in Chiang Mai since 2014, so I am continually in touch with the beauty and challenges of the environment. Our 12 rai orchard is one giant canvas where I work and play! Planting mango, lychee and flowering trees is my way of communicating with and contributing to nature. Through my poetry and artwork, I interact with nature in a more delicate and sensitive manner.

Elsewhere, I observe that our world has become desperately unreal and painfully unkind. We live in cities that imprison us mentally and physically. We have become hypnotized by digital devices that reduce the entire planet down to a world view of 100 square centimeters. This traps and traumatizes our very souls. How shall we respond?

My art, poetry, painting and books – indeed – my entire life incarnate – is a response to these painful truths. Responding to Nature is my effort to observe and interact with nature through joy, wisdom and tears. 

Tree trunks are the base medium on which I create my works because nature speaks through color and sound, patterns and cycles, stillness and silence.  Each tree presents a unique signature, telling its own story. Each piece in this collection demonstrates human creativity in response to the shapes and patterns of nature. Luckily, my father taught me woodworking skills back in the 1970s. This allows me to nurture the natural beauty and language inherent in a tree. This collaboration between nature’s fallen trees, the carpenter’s saw, the painter’s brush and the poet’s breath reveals my vision of kindness and compassion for all beings. 

To complement the human dimension, I often add a cultural element into the pieces. These curios and artefacts reveal many interesting things about us human heritage here on planet earth. This is the dimension of my art where culture meets nature.

As a teenager, I remember sitting in the forests outside Chicago in the middle of winter, knee deep in snow, poetry spontaneously arising in my youthful mind. 45 years forward to the present, I walk through our tropical forest in Chiang Mai, find a fallen tree and art stirs within. Then, contemplating these slices of fallen trees over a cup of coffee, I experience wisdom; the truth of nature. Spontaneously, with paint and brush, that wisdom is translated into the language of art.

This exhibition encourages you to reclaim your natural artistic heritage. Remember, the artist lives in every one of us, regardless of whether we bring paint to canvas or not. Please realize that the poet breathes in all of our hearts, even if we never recite or rhyme. Life is an artistic experience when we are open to the message from nature and respond to her with love and kindness.

Thomas Radzienda, 2025

Thomas Radzienda has been living in Thailand since 1992. He taught poetry and culture at SWU in Bangkok for many years before he retired and began focusing his attention on inner work. He has been meditating and practicing Reiki energy healing for the better part of twenty years, bringing him deeply in touch with his inner essence, and the truth of nature. He is the author of numerous books including Vegan Health and Spirituality. 24 years ago he made a life-time promise to all animals that he would never hurt them, pay people to kill them, or eat their bodies ever again. This vow is a promise to Life itself. From this commitment, he has become much healthier in body and spirit. His life-work focuses on the liberation of all animals that are imprisoned in factory farms. Concurrently, he helps to heal people who are trapped in illness due to their eating behaviors, mental stress and unhealthy life-styles.